""#13, What would your opinion be of this "art" if it was all over you house or apartment building? I'm sure it would change rapidly.""

Yes, and if it were some hazardous biological weapon being applied to the sidewalk instead of paint, I'm sure our opinions ("we" being those who approve of these messages) would indeed be quite different.

But *as it is*, you see, this is a harmless phenomenon.

If the messages aren't abusive, then there is no reasonable objection to letting them be put there.

Especially since they will quickly be worn away by the footsteps of passers-by. --In this respect, they are much more unobjectionable even than the most beautiful "tag," since no one 'need' pay for their removal.

There are way too many stupid rules these days, and we ought to applaud those who break the unimportant ones in good-natured ways.

re: #4 -- if that's true about the damage to the records, still it's not true about the cuteness and sexiness of using old players.

Perhaps the solution would be found in a modded/retro-steampunk turntable.

Cute + rational = cuter

"The kid screaming "No you have to be fingerprinted! Everybody has to be fingerprinted!" in Cory's recent Disneyland post is a harbinger of the real conflict that will define what it means to be human."

I think the more conservative & constructive version of the point that is latent in this statement is the one Larry Lessig made in one of his videos that (if memory serves) was linked on boingboing at some point: that, given really easy and simple decisions, our legislators tend to choose the starkly wrong one. Like copyright term extensions, like giving telcoms retroactive immunity (as may easily happen), like recommending that some ridiculous proportion of daily calories be got from sugar, and so on.

Voters are now forced into a position analogous to the screaming boy: the platform on which a presidential candidate runs is so large that pro-lifers (for example) by voting for the last cycle's republican candidate, inadvertently 'scream' their mandate for warrantless surveillance, environmental exploitation, aggressively uncompromising policymaking, the global war on 'terror' and all the rest.

As the world gets smaller, its humanity does too: my local government would not so easily make the same constellation of mistakes that the federal government makes so industriously. Time was when this view would have made me a republican... now, probably disenfranchised.

To be HUMAN is to be FREE. Look at how vacuous the word "freedom" has become, and you will see how vacuous humanity is as well.

Put millions of eggs in a single basket and you're guaranteed a mess.

Yet the concentration of power and information seem to be all the rage. Is that not a compelling rebuttal of 'the wisdom of crowds'?

Supposing the information-gathering practices used in prosecuting previous cases (e.g. Jammie's) is discovered to be illegal, would those cases' decisions be reversed?

Are interstellar attacks covered by standard insurance policies?